From The Ashes
by sapphire-child
Summary: When Claire’s house in Othersville burns down and she is separated from Aaron, it’s only the beginning of a painful rebirth. How do you keep on living when you’ve lost everything that you never knew you wanted?


**Title:** From the Ashes  
**Characters:** Claire, Charlie  
**Original Post Date:** 22/03/2008  
**Spoilers:** based on my own speculation for the rest of S4 after seeing the preview for episodes 9 and onwards  
**Summary:** When her house burns down it's only the beginning of a painful rebirth. How do you keep on living when you've lost everything that you never knew you wanted? Written for lostfichallenge #68: one true pairing and my claim on 50darkfics for the prompt of "phoenix"  
**Disclaimer:** in case you haven't figured it out yet…these people aren't mine.

* * *

She's trapped.

She's trapped inside and she can't get out and it's so much more terrifying than she could have ever imagined because she knows – she _knows_ that she's going to be burnt alive and there's nothing she can do about it, nobody who will come to her rescue…

The only one who would've run into a burning building to save her…

She can hear screams from outside. Nobody will ever hear her now but she tries anyway.

_Please help me…_

Knees, carpet, lungs, breathe…

_I can't do this alone…_

Cinders, ash, smoke and flame…

_I'm sorry Aaron – I'm sorry Charlie._

She's unconscious before she even hits the floor.

* * *

Her eyes open to a pair of bare feet in front of her and a hoarse, accented voice calling her name from above. For one foolish, addled moment she thinks that it might be the Almighty himself, come to retrieve her.

_Are you there God? It's me, Claire._

But then he speaks again.

"Get up."

"I can't," she whimpers and she shuts her eyes again and begins a coughing fit that shakes her body until she starts to sob with the pain.

"You can't just give up now!"

"I can't _do_ this. It hurts so much…"

"You thought it was going to tickle?" the voice is angry now. "_Get up_."

She looks up at him, silhouetted against the flames as the roof falls down around her and his eyes are so intense and dark – she almost doesn't recognise him.

"Did you come to take me with you?" she somehow manages to croak out.

"No," He reaches a hand down and she takes it mutely and lets him pull her to her feet. She's right up close to him, almost heartbeat to heartbeat and she buckles and falls against him, dizzy from the smoke.

"I came here to save you."

* * *

The roof falls in just as she crawls out of the back door and she pauses to look back at what was her home in nothing short of pure horror. Through the smoke she can see him, framed by the burning doorframe.

"Run," he tells her flatly. "Or they'll find you and they'll kill you. _Run_."

She scrambles to her feet. She wants to touch him one last time, but the fire roars and another roof beam falls, smashing to the ground in front of her feet in an explosion of sparks. She leaps backwards, crying out a wordless plea…

But he's already gone and there's more fire and smoke than she's ever seen before in her life and suddenly one of Them see her through the haze and they yell out.

She doesn't waste any more time then.

She runs.

* * *

She's black from soot and her legs are shaking from tiredness by the time she feels safe enough to stop running. Her eyes and throat sting from smoke damage and she can feel her skin blistering from burns she hadn't even felt till now. Her clothes smell like smoke, her hair is singed, she's starving and thirsty and she has nothing. No water, no food, no idea where she is. No Charlie to help her, no Aaron to look after.

She has nothing.

It's a cruel rebirth – once again she's been stripped of everything that she's come to rely upon. In a way it's like she's gone back in time to the plane crash – but even then she had other people who could help her, basic food and water supplies, the comforting presence of the unborn child in her womb…

Now she has nothing.

She finds a stream and lowers her aching body into the cool water, trembling and crying at the pain as it touches every inch of her tender, burnt skin. She lies there in the shallows for hours, sobbing her pain away, letting the salt of her tears fall onto her cracked, blistered lips.

It's dark before she even realises and she crawls shivering from the water and curls up in the roots of a tree but she's so deeply chilled and in so much pain from the burns that she can't sleep. As she shudders and judders and begins to lose herself again to her tears she feels someone come to sit beside her and put their arm carefully around her trembling shoulders. She jumps in surprise but she's too exhausted to even open her eyes to look at them and really – she knows who it is anyway.

"I'll be here all night," he whispers and she nods, her teeth chattering. "I won't leave you Claire. I promise."

* * *

She wakes up alone.

The water from the stream is beautifully cool against her burnt lips and throat but it does nothing to stop the spikes of hunger. She staggers to her feet and wonders where to go to next. She can't go back to the barracks now but she can't just stay here and hope that someone will find her and take her home again. She misses Aaron with an ache that won't go away but she's secretly glad that he's not here with her – she's not certain she would have been able to take care of him as well as herself.

She hopes that Hurley managed to get away with him.

"You've got to follow the stream."

She turns and he's standing ankle deep in the water, nodding his head in the direction he wants her to take. She's not all that surprised to see him there. What does surprise her is the look on his face – like he really can't be bothered. He follows the curve of the stream and she watches until he's out of sight.

And then she follows.

* * *

She walks along the stream for three days and slowly it becomes a river and then it peters out into the ocean. Maybe if she just follows the beach she can make it back? She sets off with a new purpose, foraging for fruit along the way to keep her energy up.

She sleeps on cool sand underneath the stars and listens to the oceans lullaby and sometimes when she's cold or tired or the mosquito's are gnawing on her tender skin she feels his arms around her and she knows that he's watching over her and keeping her safe.

She doesn't know what she did to deserve this.

Maybe, she thinks, it's what she didn't do.

* * *

It takes her nearly two weeks to get back. The beach camp is quiet but they give a rousing cry when she stumbles into their midst and falls to her knees, gasping with homesickness and weak from exhaustion.

"Claire!" Desmond is the first one to her side. "They said you were dead!"

"I'm not." She says and then she laughs as though it's the funniest thing she's ever heard before in her life.

"She's delirious," Desmond says wonderingly and scoops her up in his arms.

Juliet treats her burns and bites and Sawyer brings her water and fish but she's too exhausted to even chew and so he merely trickles some of the water down her throat and then goes to find some fruit to mash up instead.

The first thing she asks when she finally comes to her senses is, "Where are all the others? Hurley? John? Kate?"

Juliet and Desmond glance bitterly at each other and then back to Claire again.

"Some of them left. On the freighter. They took Ben with them."

Claire's head whirls. "And Aaron?"

"They took him," Juliet's voice is strangled with emotion. "We thought you were dead and well…they said it's what you would have wanted. What Charlie would have wanted. For Aaron to be safe, for him to go back home again."

_Aaron's gone. Everything is gone. You have nothing left._

She bursts out with a wailing sob that segues into a fit of coughs and tears – her lungs are still badly damaged. Sawyer pauses on the threshold and then ducks away without giving her the fruit, Desmond pats her knee awkwardly and Juliet drops her eyes as though to give her some privacy in her grief.

That night he visits her for the last time, stroking her hair apologetically, "I'm sorry. I didn't know this would happen."

"Why did you come back to me?" she whispers into the dark. "Why didn't you just let me die?"

"Because you needed me," he whispers back. "You never would have survived and you need to Claire, you _need_ to."

"I'd rather be dead!" she sobs breathlessly.

"For now," he says softly, presses a kiss to her forehead and then he slips away.

* * *

The rug slips out from underneath her feet more often than she would like it to, but she's finally learning to live her new life. The cradle stands barren and empty beside her bed and she dreams alternately of raging fires burning her to ashes and angry waves pulling and sucking her under until she's suffocating, drowning, and she wakes up gasping for air.

One day she knows that she'll have to go through all of this all over again. One day the world will flip her on her head once more and she's going to have to hold on tightly if she doesn't want to lose her grip on reality.

Again.

She hopes that Charlie will be there next time, just like the last time. She's sure that with him guarding her, guiding her, watching over her, she'll be able to one day pick up all the lost and broken pieces and put them back into some semblance of the order they used to be in.

And if he doesn't come back…

She never told the others that it was Charlie who saved her that day from the fire. That he was the one who kept her going when she'd lost all purpose and all hope. She knows that there are plenty of rational explanations to his appearance (dehydration springs to mind, as does malnutrition, smoke inhalation…) but whether he was a delirious hallucination or something entirely, she knows that she'd be long dead without him.

For the first time since she met him, she is truly grateful to him. She just wishes that she could tell him how much it means to her.

The ashes from her solitary fire settle on her knees and she brushes them off with a shudder. She always banks the fire before she goes to bed. The smoke helps keep the biting bugs away but there's no sense in letting an accident creep up on her. She's lived too many nightmares already.

She crawls onto her makeshift bed for sleep. The ocean whispers and a nearby fire crackles and sends glowing embers into the night sky. And just before she falls into sleep, she opens her hand and looks at the silver glinting against her palm and she can almost see him again, reflected in the shine of the ring.


End file.
